2 down 10 to go

Chemo treatment #2 has come and gone. So far I'm feeling pretty decent so perhaps some of the tips I received from S last Friday have paid off. No real nausea to speak of but I did not sleep well at all last night so am very tired today.

My Mom went to chemo with me yesterday. We were scheduled to start at 8:45am and we were pretty much on time. I was thinking while we were shown into my spot that 2 weeks ago I must have been given the 1st timers VIP treament with a bed and nice little cubby. This week was a plastic green lazyboy style chair which was about 1 metre off the nurses station and against a wall with virtually no place to move around. Interesting. No tvs/DVDs either. Total rip off. Anyway our first nurse (one of four yesterday) actually managed to find a vein. I noticed I had a juicy one on my left hand, it's been good like that from working out I think (3 work outs last week!!). So that actually went well as did the first 3 drugs. However, that dirty Dacarbazine got me again, in a different way this time. The third nurse started the drip of dD and it felt a little bit funny to me. She went to the nurses station and I said to my Mom, "hey, um can you go get her, this isn't feeling right". By the time they got back my forearm hurt so bad I could barely breathe and it was also ice cold. So we stopped the chemo, found some hot packs and a heating pad that worked and turned on the saline pump as the gravity wasn't pulling enough saline to counteract the dD. Try number two. Already starts hurting a few pumps in. Oy. Change the saline bag, turn down the dD, try another 2 heating pads, finallly get them working and we are set. But, by this time we are really running late. Additionally the dD goes in really slowly as it's been turned down so much. The upside is that I don't feel sick from it like I did last treatment, the downside is being there until noon, an hour longer than I would have expected. Anyhoo, I felt so good after the treatment that I even drove myself home!

I had a few naps yesterday afternoon which were probably my undoing last night as I had a very difficult time falling asleep, even with Ativan to help me. My husband woke me at 5:30am to take my Kytril (anti-nauseant) so that I would hopefully avoid the "morning sickness" I had last time and, believe it or not, it seems to be working. I've had virtually no nausea, just fatigue, and a very mild headache. So perhaps I will go to see Anthony Bourdain tonight...how cool would that be?